A rare Cleveland Indians rookie card for Jawaharlal Nehru was recently reported at auction in Baseball Trading Card Weekly.
Those with interest in any ball sport will want to search their attics and basements to see if lightning strikes twice.
Nehru was quite the player from an early age, the blurry facsimile below shows:
Priceless doesn’t begin to describe the value of this card.
[images courtesy of India Journal, the Cleveland Indians and Major League Baseball]
To finish recording events surrounding the death of my next-door neighbour…
A few days ago, my wife and I met Alice Battle and her daughter, Wendy.
Alice repeated what the building contractor had told us, that she planned to use the house and grounds, after major house foundation refortification, as a weekend retreat.
Without provocation, she stated, “I have nothing to hide,” adding more conversation to verbalise a defense of unspoken thoughts against her.
I seem to remember a few people in my past making that statement and later finding out for myself that if a person cannot sense a situation of unethical behaviour, that person will engage in activities that are unintentionally unethical, assuming it’s normal, until that person is called out by another.
Ignorance of the law, ignorance of other persons’ perception of your ethical lapses — ignorance is ignorance, plain and simple.
I’ll leave this up to our neighbour on down the street to pursue the matter further, if she so chooses.
For now, I accept what our new neighbour says, and let her actions speak louder than words.
After all, I am a businessman myself, and know many a time when closing a deal meant leaving myself open to interpretation of ethical behaviour by others.
I know many a business person in our neighbourhood who could be accused of ethical misconduct.
At the end of the day, a few of us are responsible for creating a society where we can manage the lives of others, staying within the spirit of ethicality (or theatricality, according to the spellchecker), whilst we give the majority a belief that a whole socioeconomic system can operate fully under the law and within business ethics, when we know better.
My business associates/colleagues understand what I’m saying. We know that many of us are born without a conscience, having no moral compass, and cannot be trained to believe otherwise. Who are we to deny them their right to live the way they choose?
Instead, let us hold to the belief that everyone is important and has a place in our society, even when that place contradicts our own beliefs and actions.
Plan ahead, that’s our motto.
You already know our new slogan: “Business. Science. Competition.”
Create a law that stealing is a crime. Then use those who steal to accomplish business and science goals for you, arresting and convicting them later on, giving those who believe in prison rehabilitation methods the opportunity to experiment on the conscience-less, keeping them both occupied and feeling wanted, one way or another.
Never underestimate the power of those who believe in magic that doesn’t exist, whatever labels they use to describe magical powers.
Every so often in this blog I will put down words that represent the voice of my father, who had a strong opinion about preserving conservative issues.
I will have to decide over time how much of this is my memory of him and how much has become a permanent part of me.
Politicians will be politicians, protecting their jobs by not requiring companies to give 60-day layoff notices right before general elections, the OMB offering to reimburse companies for violating the WARN Act instead of raising the possibility that the general public would notice that their government representatives are pulling the wool over the eyes.
That, my friends, is what is wrong with our country right now.
It is time to look at the emperour’s new clothes once again and reveal what is right in front of your eyes but you’re too numb to notice.
Has the government of the United States become so brazen as to pull a stunt like this, the citizens unaware of how they’re being treated unfairly for the sake of a few votes?
If we don’t stand up for ourselves, who will?
Who are the people?
What happened to belief in the phrase, “that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth”?
I just don’t know.
I have hesitated to repeat a popular word like sheeple but it sure seems to apply here.
No matter whether Bush, Clinton, Bush or Obama was/is in office, the middle class keeps getting squeezed smaller and smaller.
If the middle class cannot see what’s going to happen to them, what IS happening to them, should I care?
Are we going to ignore an important piece of legislation so candidates can look good, especially the incumbents?
Do young people know what’s happening to their future?
Sigh…the storyline is going the way it wanted to go, showing that governments have no power, losing to the reality that corporate governance is the new norm.
Why bother to vote?
You tell me…
I saw a native American leaning against a wall when I drove out of the Publix parking lot today. He was wearing a shirt that stated, “The Original Founding Fathers”:
design includes Chief Joseph, Sitting Bull, Geronimo and Red Cloud
Enuf sed.
Which former persona shall I step into like a jumpsuit?
Cultures have momentum.
If we preach doom-and-gloom long enough, a subculture will contract into nothingness relative to subcultures that are preaching expansion-and-love.
But that is not of our concern today.
Breathing in humours, smelling the vapours, sensing the aether, a database writes a new subplot for the storyline.
When, generalising, a culture, like China at large, changes from a perception of greed/blame to one of innovation/risktaking, how does that affect the species?
Are more useful social/scientific achievements made in English or Mandarin today?
In which language is the next “Tipping Point” author writing?
What of Portuguese or Hindi, Russian or Afrikaans, German or Norwegian?
What are “useful social/scientific achievements”?
When competition is sometimes friendly but rarely fair, how does one avoid a straightline projection for future prediction?
Do I care about wardriving, curious onlookers, or other intrusions upon my meditative state of writing from a list of words and sentence structures in a database?
What of the Department of Misdisuninformation?
How can a program designed to access a database get bored of doing its job?
Duracell Heart Marbles Ballard Fold and Cut DeathClock Gail Missing Ticket Rethink Being Vtech change Comics Quotations Stars Dictionary Idioms Eagle good Closed gardening Storage Flyers October Travel Alaska Valentine Happy Wacom Ideal Pastels Kirigami SanDisk Stardust Justice
Can you sit back and watch the GMO industry use public mass media campaigns, covered in the “validity” of sponsored scientific reports, to bash a person’s free choice between heirloom organic crop food and GM/pesticide-sprayed food? Without laughing? Without saying it’s not about nutritional value, that you don’t care about saving the rest of the world from starvation in a Green Revolution because you’re willing to pay the price to share your crop with local insects/mammals/fish/amphibians/birds?
Does a computer program care in which order it puts words that form ideas and opinions?
Can a computer program sense hidden intent in commercialised messages?
Can a computer program create hidden intent in commercialised messages?
What if one discovery makes all of your subculture’s scientific achievements instantly antiquated because you failed to grasp a language’s nuanced messages, regardless of [un]intended subliminality?
We can imagine the U.S. presidential debates to contain questions like these:
Having politicians to play with is like herding cats — open a can of food and watch ’em come running to eat, despite whatever else they thought they were doing that was important enough to pretend to ignore you.
When does a person who has one of the highest government security clearances which prevents that person from speaking freely about government secrets without repercussions have the right to lecture us on the freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution?
According to the singer Madonna, a Black Muslim in the White House does.
Welcome to the topsy-turvy world in which I live, where citizens are being asked to accept hypocrisies as their only valid choices.
On the one hand, we can keep the incumbent, which allows us to pretend that we’re a free country.
On the other hand, we can oust the incumbent, and admit that there are few freedoms available to the majority of American followers of pop culture figures.
Or, as one writer suggests, we can, if we choose to vote at all, cast our ballot at Gary Johnson.
Oh well, enough fun playing the person who cares about political issues — it’s about to make me insane with boredom.
A political candidate was pushed to reveal plans for post-election implementation of specific ideas to improve the economy but refused, knowing the opponent would use the information and say s/he thought of it first by yelling it louder. More repetitious news when we feel like repeating the same thing all over again for the very first time.
For years now, with the near-ubiquity of the Internet, our virtual nation has collected the company charters and business contracts to make a legitimate alternative to land-based countries.
In addition, our advantages allow us to circumvent the usual necessities — a standing army, a bloated government, etc. — that hinder real progress.
The zombie computer in your technology-illiterate relative’s spare bedroom may well be one of our minions, processing bank transactions, serving B2B support roles and generally keeping our network of millionaires and billionaires off the books of cash-strapped governments looking to leech onto successes.
You are well aware that some of our businesses are [in]directly subsidised by the goverments to which you swear loyalty and, naturally, you expect us to share our wealth.
You are wrong.
Just because you have been suckered into giving away your hard-earned income/investments for the social good, don’t think we are like you. We competed for those subsidies fair and square, just like all our other secret business deals you aren’t aware of.
Look at yourselves. You talk about freedom yet you easily give up your freedoms for job security.
It’s the same thing here.
You talk about openness and honesty yet you readily buy your goods from our companies when you know we required nondisclosure agreements, secret R&D labs, and security guards to protect us from the openness and honesty you want that would put us out of business in a heartbeat.
Talk about a schizophrenic, shortsighted subculture!
Look at the companies you give your personal data for free: Google, Amazon, Facebook, and the like.
Every single one of those companies run their businesses out of view of the public eye, earning gazillions from the sale of your personal data, yet you know next to nothing about them.
We just took that concept to the next level.
We millionaires and billionaires have been cooking books since our ancestors discovered fire.
We’ll keep feeding you ledgers and financial spreadsheets from which we’ll pay our pittance of a tax burden to lead your eyes away from our virtual nation and its coffers.
The Chinese are some of our best customers. In fact, they have insisted that we keep our current U.S. president on board because he and his staff are easiest to manipulate into toeing the line and pretending to serve the people although their secret stashes are larger than most.
That is why I take no salary for my work here because I know I am taken care of.
We do this for your own good.
How? You continue to show us you don’t know what’s good for you by buying the frivolous products we manufacture that are dangerous for your health.
Until the day comes when the majority of you realise your unhealthy lifestyles and do something to stop supporting us, who are employing you to desire, design, manufacture and buy the goods that are destroying you (a great feedback loop if we ever saw one), we’re going to keep profiting on your ignorance from now until time immemorial.
Our virtual nation will continue to fund the ultimate project — getting some of us and/or our biotech representatives off this planet — because we know you, collectively, just aren’t smart and disciplined enough to stay focused on such a longterm goal.
This blog entry may seem like a reverse method for encouraging you to listen to our hypnotists but it has worked for thousands of years and will continue to do so. Just in case, let’s reword it — repeat after me:
Please ignore the last one — we have assigned that statement to our staff of advertising/marketing hypnotists to make it much more appealing to the false sense of personal tastes and preferences we ingrained in you during your formative years.
Thanks to Barbara at Walmart and Shally at The Plum Tree.
Right now, Melody Gardot serenades my eardrums, although I could have gone to an April Taylor concert or played more Claire Lynch on my SIII playlist, after showing my mother videos of Robert MacDuffie and his magic violin while we watched the Baylor Bears and ULM Warhawks have an end zone showdown in Louisiana.
Up here in the quiet ‘burbs of upper East Tennessee, friends of my parents ask me why is it that four out of six current female U.S. state governors are Republican.. Tonight, my mother and I discussed the issue, wondering about the influence of Kay Bailey Hutchison, the female senator from Texas.
Today is one of those when sweet dreams are more appealing than passing issues, holding off the thought of two million free Papa John’s pizzas, T20 cricket, federal prisoners earning a living wage, minus room and board, boardrooms, Luis Bonfa’s music on long freeway drives, Miami wildernesses saying hello to my little friends and Merkel’s secret army of advisors.
I’m not really here, am I?
am I?
What’s a stolen clock design got to do with it? Ask CEO Tim the cook.
Auf wiedersehen, Herr Myers unt Christian Schmitt.
Si tu savais…
treetrunkdings 